World War Two and the Islands Under Martial Law

Hawaii was not a state in December nineteen forty-one. It was a territory, which meant that when the military governor declared martial law on December seventh, the day of the Pearl Harbor attack, he had legal authority to suspend civilian courts, censor the press, control the movement of civilians, and govern by military order. He used all of that authority. Martial law in Hawaii lasted nearly three years, until October twenty-fourth, nineteen forty-four.

The experience was different in Hawaii than on the mainland in one crucial respect. Of the one hundred twenty thousand people of Japanese ancestry forcibly removed to internment camps on the West Coast, virtually none were from Hawaii. Japanese Americans made up roughly thirty-seven percent of Hawaii's population in nineteen forty-one. To intern them all would have been logistically impossible and economically catastrophic for the territory. Instead, the Japanese American community in Hawaii was subjected to martial law, surveillance, curfews, and targeted arrests of community leaders, while most continued to live in their homes and work their jobs.

The one to two thousand or so Japanese Americans in Hawaii who were interned, community leaders, Buddhist priests, Japanese-language school teachers, men deemed security risks by the military authorities, were often separated from their families for years. Their neighbors, equally Japanese in ancestry, were not. The distinction was practical rather than principled, and the people on both sides of it knew it.

What the war produced in Hawaii was a community that had survived occupation by its own government and demonstrated its loyalty through service at extraordinary cost. The four hundred forty-second Regimental Combat Team, built overwhelmingly from Hawaii's Nisei sons, became the most decorated unit of its size in American military history. The men who came home did not come home to the territory they had left. They came home to a political movement that would make Hawaii a state within fifteen years.